So I finally decided to post here about it. For a while now I've been building a new game from the ground up in C++14 this is the primary reason I've stopped working on FoFiX. I've actually been working on this project slowly since March 2015 but a lot of that time was spent learning C++ and getting better at OpenGL.

The project is still in fairly early stages at this point with no playable game, however most of the work has been in building the base "game engine" side of things. I've got basic midi reading working, 2d track rendering, and music playback is wip still.

The game is written in C++14(as mentioned before) uses OpenGL 3.3 for graphics rendering and is cross platform. I'm wanting to support at a minimum Windows, Linux, and, macOS (OSX).

This is what things look like currently:

old videos:

There is no ETA for when a playable version will be available because I still have quite a lot of work ahead of me until i get to that point.

So now to explain some of my plans for this project.

Game PlayMy overall goal is to have a single cohesive game. I'm not going to be implementing optional gameplay features. This means there will be 1 hopo system, there wont be any way of turning off solos or any weird stuff like that. I'm also not going to be cloning any specific game's feature set and will be choosing features from several different games to build on. For example I'm not going to have support for solo button tapping with rock band controllers, however I will be supporting tap notes. There will be no trill lanes or rb4 freestyle solos. Open notes on guitar/bass will be supported(with open pull offs and sustains).

ThemesLonger term I will be supporting themes to the highest degree possible. I want to have a consistent game-wide UI system which themes have total control of. The only restriction here is themes will not change any gameplay functionality as mentioned earlier. Even longer down the road i'd like to have tools which assist with theme creation.

Hit detectionI've taken a look at various game's hit detection and tried to figure out how they work I've looked at FoFiX, GH3, PS, and RB4. The game which has the most strange hit detection is FoFiX which takes an overly complicated route for implementing HOPO's. The other 3 for the most part fairly similar however Phase Shift has the most obvious flaws that i can find. Turning on VSYNC will effect the accuracy of game play and there are problems with strumming HOPO's because if you play a hopo then strum it slightly behind that the game will detect that as a rogue strum or strum the note behind the hopo.

So my hit detection system is going to require a fairly advanced input system that is not tied to the game thread thread. This will allow me to get timestamps for all input events and use those to have more accurate hit detection when consumed on the game thread.

GraphicsI'm aiming to have very good performance on pretty much any hardware from the last 8 years including low to mid range laptops. So as long as the device supports OpenGL 3.3 I want to have the game to run and be playable in some capacity. However graphics should be able to be turned way down in those cases.Something this game is gonna have... particle effects, all of the particle effects . This is something that PS, FoFiX, and GH3 either doesn't have or support very limited particles for performance reasons.

I also have plenty of ideas for stuff like online and nice 3D stages but i'll save those for another time.

Something else I want to put out here, I've been considering breaking away from the FoF/FoFiX/PS song formats in small ways. Such as using JSON instead of ini files for song data and maybe some midi changes/improvements. If you have any thoughts about this feel free to express them.If you want to contribute 2D/3D graphics, Sound Effects, Music, or Code please do so it would be of great help. (I'm also in need of some kind of logo since I've not had any good ideas at this point)

For those interested about the performance of the current codebase. I get about 5500 fps on my desktop machine which is using an amd FX-8320 @ 4.5ghz and a r9 290x and running windows. Then it gets 2200fps on the intel nuc i use for linux and lower powered testing which is running an intel i3-5010U which has integrated Intel HD 5500. So this is still early stuff doing only 2d rendering but hopefully soon i'll be able to expand rendering to also do 3D.

Well I don't want to rule anything out at this point feature / instrument / gameplay wise but I also am not going to directly say one way or another if I will do them.

It will be exactly the same as current games in the songs department. I'll be trying to source some royalty free music and get some people to chart it to bundle with the game. But anyone should be able to make songs and if I do end up changing the song format slightly from older games I'll make sure to have conversion tools.

Last edited by weirdpeople on Fri Mar 17, 2017 7:33 am, edited 1 time in total.

A great amount of progress has been made since I last posted an update here.Rewritten beat line marking code and some of the midi parser to be able to mark with time signatures. Beat marking also now handles tempo changes that occur between beats(even if you had several tiny tempo changes all between two beats it should handle it)Solo markingOD section markingBasic frets.Tails have a texture.Tails react to being "hit"

- Online scoreboard ,Maybe like the one from Audiosurf, that would be pretty cool.

- Being able to play with the mouse like PC GH games

- Working whammy bar: The PS Whammy doesn't makes any effect on the master tracks, it doens't even gives extra star power

- Level system: Get XP by playing and completing songs, and leveling up

- No fail mode: This is some kind of a classic, you fail a note, you lose.

- Achievements for songs: Like "Get X score in this song", "Don't use star power in the whole song", "Complete the song in No Fail mode" and blah blah blah.

- General achievements: "FC X amount of songs", "Complete 100 songs", "Get a total of 100.000.000 score" and that kind of stuff.

- Cheats: Cheats for singleplayer, things like songs at 10 times the normal speed, playing songs backwards, and other weird stuff like that.

- Crowd claping: I always loved how the crowd claped when you activated star power in FoFix, this is not in PS tho :(

- Online server for songs/IG web browser: Not sure if this is going to be possible, but I would LOVE to be able to download songs for the game without closing it, opening my browser, going to the forums and looking for the chart I want, if we could have a way to directly download a song for the game while playing it, things would be easier for everyone.

Any of that would be awesome. I'm very excited for the game ^^

Last edited by MetalMuxxer on Thu May 25, 2017 1:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I am definitely wanting to have a lot of online features especially a leaderboard and multiplayer. What you are calling "cheats" I've wanted to do as well. Whammy will certainly be doing a pitchbend effect.

I don't know about using mouse for gameplay but i was planning on having the mouse supported for stuff like menu navigation so it probably won't be a huge deal to support it for gameplay, we shall see on this one.

I still poke my head in here from time to time and I saw your post in the FoFiX thread, so I just wanted to stop by and offer you some kind words. I'm stoked to see you're still doing coding for this sort of stuff.

Most of my gaming is Xbox based these days, and between RB4 and RB3 + customs haven't felt the need to come back to PC clones, but once you've got something installable, I'll have to check back and see if I can do some bug-testing for ya' like in the old days.

I've got audio working it only loads a single ogg currently, but loading multiple won't be far behind support is already in the audio cod i just need to clean up the song code to be able to load all of the tracks in a sane way.